CHAPTER -1
INTRODUCTION
A mobile ad-hoc network consists of moving nodes which have the ability to configure
themselves without the involvement of central surveillance. The nodes converse with other nodes
within communication range through wireless medium. If the node is out of the communication
range then it’s not possible to communicate directly. In this case MANET relies on multi hop
data transmission. Each node in a MANET is allowed to move self-rulingly in any direction
which influences the network to various kinds of attacks because node can join and move the
network at any point of time and will therefore the connectivity with other nodes will be
evolving often. The key test in building a MANET is preparing every node to ceaselessly keep
up the information needed to legitimately route the traffic.
Routing in mobile ad-hoc networks is node centric. Routing protocols in ad-hoc networks
can be classified as proactive and reactive. Proactive protocols such as Routing Information
Protocol, Link State protocol, Open Shortest Path First protocols maintain consistent, up-to-date
routing information of the entire network. With the proactive protocols, each node in the network
maintains one or more routing tables to store the routing information and also keep the update of
changes in the network. On the other hand reactive protocols such as DSR and AODV are on
demand protocols. These protocol attempts to dispense with the conventional routing tables and
diminish the requirement for overhauling these tables to track changes in the network topology.
Reactive protocols offer several advantages over proactive protocols. Unlike proactive routing
protocols there is no routing advertisement in reactive protocols, thereby reduces the network
bandwidth overhead.
Due to the varying topology MANETs are powerless to various sorts of attacks. These
attacks can disrupt the routing process. The most common and frequent attacks in MANET are
blackhole attack, grayhole attack, jamming, data corruption etc. A blackhole attack is a type of
denial-of-service attack in which an intermediate node, that is supposed to relay packets, tosses
them. Grayhole attack is like slow poison. In this attack selective packets are dropped and
remaining other packets is forwarded. Jamming is a kind of attack where the legitimate traffic is
overwhelmed by illegitimate traffic. Data corruption occurs when transmitted data is been
modified by hackers. Several researches have been done to detect these kinds of attacks.
When compared with wired networks where the nodes must have physical access to the
network medium, mobile ad-hoc networks have no obvious secure limit. The attackers can
communicate with all nodes once they are in the transmission scope of any other device.
Henceforth security is the significant concern with the MANET. Many research works have
concentrated on the security of MANETS. The vast majority of them deal with prevention and
detection approaches to combat individual misbehaving nodes. In this respect, the viability of
these methodologies gets to be feeble at the point when different misbehaving nodes conspire
together to launch a collaborative attack, which may result to all the more destroying harms to
the network.
Security in terms of data integrity and confidentiality is a major issue in MANET. Since
the topology changes frequently node can turn to be malicious at any instant in the network.
With the popularity of MANET devices, the need for MANET security has increased
significantly. Data confidentiality and data integrity can be achieved by using encryption
decryption algorithms for sending the files confidentially through the mobile ad-hoc network.
There are very popular encryption and decryption algorithms like DES, 3DES, AES and RSA.
Data encryption standard is a symmetric encryption algorithm which uses 56 bits key. 3DES is
an advanced application of DES. 3DES uses 3 keys and three executions of DES algorithm.
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has security strength better than 3DES and altogether
enhanced the proficiency. With AES key length can be 128, 192 and 256 bits. On the other hand
RSA is an asymmetric encryption algorithm. These cryptographic algorithms and cryptographic
tools like Public-Key-Infrastructure, digital signature, digital certificates are used by researches
to provide security for mobile ad hoc network.
